Compuware Launches Eclipse-Based Mainframe Application Analysis Tool

Compuware Corporation announced the release of its next-generation upgrade of Xpediter with Eclipse 2.0. This latest upgrade of the industry-standard analysis and debugging tool enables new mainframe talent to support mission-critical business applications more quickly using a familiar point-and-click environment.

As mainframe IT professionals continue to retire, IT leaders must find new personnel to maintain and enhance their critical mainframe business applications. This loss of experienced developers also means the loss of the institutional knowledge essential to supporting the organization's critical systems.

Compuware Xpediter helps the next generation of developers analyze applications and quickly understand the business processes and data flows in those applications, avoiding an unnecessarily steep learning curve. Xpediter with Eclipse 2.0 also helps these new developers become productive quicker by moving away from the traditional "green screen" interface and providing a modernized point-and-click environment, to which these new employees are accustomed.

"Xpediter/Eclipse looks like the Java and C++ Eclipse development environment because it is the same Eclipse framework," Tyler Allman, product manager for mainframe solutions at Compuware, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We leveraged everything we could in Eclipse when implementing this modernized user interface for our mainframe debuggers. With few exceptions we maintained the complete look and feel of Eclipse."

Xpediter with Eclipse 2.0 is a product in the Compuware Mainframe Solutions family. These solutions, the vendor says, combine to help address four leading IT challenges: achieving greater productivity with fewer resources, complying with data privacy laws/rules, improving application performance with less downtime, and transitioning a new workforce into a multi-tier enterprise environment.

Developers can do full programming with Xpediter, and an additional tool helps with the process, Allman explains. "Xpediter is useful in all steps of mainframe application development from developing entirely new applications to maintaining and enhancing existing systems." He adds that another component, named Xplorer for z, or simply, "X4z," is also being shipped with Xpediter, thus "providing the functionality necessary for the full programming cycle of source code editing, compiling, testing and debugging." Both products are included at no additional cost with the Xpediter debuggers, Allman adds.

Seasoned mainframe developers are also likely to get a productivity boost by using the tool as well, Allman says. "Anyone who's been in the IT industry for a few years has certainly seen the seasoned mainframe programmers who work in character based 3270 environments and can navigate through screens, switch environments, issues complex parameter laden line commands in a blazingly fast flurry of keystrokes. We do see seasoned mainframe programmers who welcome this new interface, and they are excited to have the option of either leveraging the original interface or leaving the character based 3270 development environment behind, or using both."